Fake creativity

I am not creative. That may look false to you, if you see my other documents, or other things I do, and think of them as original and creative. Hence this essay. (If it looks true to you, there's no new claim to convince you of here, but these musings might nevertheless be interesting.)

I never come up with anything novel or unexpected. All I do is observe things, and apply one of a set of pre-understood logical principles to turn things into other things, as guided by a problem. If there is a destination — if there is an intent for something to be solved — I will likely get there, but I cannot go in a new direction unguided by the world's provocation.

If my creations look creative, it is only sith the rules I applied to move thru the space of ideas were different from the ones you're used to. Never do I think truly outside the box — instead, deeply inside the box, just a different box from you.

As for some apparent counterexamples:

• my puns are algorithmic in just this way
• predictive history classes came from looking at history classes and taking epistemic principles popularised in Yudkowsky's Sequences a bit too far
• that cone model of freedom arose when I heard reference to a linear spectrum of freedom and applied geometric principles to find the right model
• I come up with new words by a few fixed methods
  • notice a meaning, devise a word as a problem/task
  • notice a morpheme, slap it together with other morphemes as they arise in my mind
  • notice a word, inflect it in obvious ways
• estuar's connection to predictive processing was obvious as I developed an understanding of the latter and formulated it into three estaur-isomorphic steps

Anyone who learned a similar background to me could come up with the same solutions to each problem I encountered for my innovations. At no point do I use a mysterious mechanism of creativity.

§ As for everyone else

What do other people do in place of this? Whether uniform to everyone else or varying by the individual, I see a few options. I know not which is accurate.

• Others also think by applying a set of rules towards a goal ...
  • ... and know this, but don't talk about it.
  • ... and mostly don't recognise this.
• Others actually have an inscrutable creative mechanism.
• Others have an unscrutinised, but scrutable, creative mechanism, and the description above roughly constitutes such a scrutiny.

If inscrutable creativity does exist, as some suggest, I would want it. Tho the change is not a particular priority, and may be impossible by current knowledge, accessing such a mechanism may be preferable to my current seemingly-algorithmic mind.